1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a hydroponic growing system and a method of growing, harvesting, processing and distributing algae or other microorganisms And their benefits, uses and by-products, including, but not limited to bio diesel, animal feed, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Photosynthetic organisms, or more commonly plants, can produce virtually any substance man has need of. For many years plants have produced foodstuffs, clothing materials, and other basics necessary for the survival of humankind. Recently, bioengineered plants have been developed that produce other useful materials such as designed pharmaceuticals and chemical intermediates. Further, even the most basic of plants can be used to help remove carbon dioxide from the Earth's air. This is an important benefit as increased levels of carbon dioxide from an industrial society are linked to global warming and environmental detriment.
One use of plants which has recently been of renewed interest is their provision of clean energy. While plant matter has been burned for fuel since the early history of mankind, recently the use of plants as a source for variable combustable materials which can be used for motor fuel has seen increased interest. Nations around the world are beginning to recognize that emissions from motor fuels, particularly gasoline and diesel fuel, are undesirable. Further, current materials which are generally petrochemicals refined from geologic deposits, are a limited resource and fuels which can potentially supersede them are of particular scientific interest. The burning of many plant based products is cleaner than the burning of petroleum products, resulting in improved environmental conditions; and is a renewable source of fuel.
Currently the two most well known bio-fuels which are seeing a large amount of press are ethanol, an alcohol generally made from sugarcane, rapeseed, corn, or other plant matter which is used as an additive to gasoline; and biodiesel, which is a mixture of diesel fuel with various forms of plant oil (generally soybean or rapeseed oil). Biodiesel may also comprise pure vegetable oils or vegetable oil blends, in some cases burning cooking oils. In the current world, both ethanol and plant oil based materials are used as additives to existing petrochemicals to provide for mixtures due to both price and consumer interest in these materials. Further, as current motor vehicles are not necessarily optimized for operation on these fuels, mixtures often produce better resultant fuel economy (where fuel is broadly defined to include the petrochemical and additive blend) than burning the additive alone.
Gasoline engines can also have trouble with the lighter ethanol material. In the future it is expected that engines will be built which are designed to run on these types of fuels exclusively and obtain better efficiency than today's engines which are not necessarily optimized for use with these types of fuels. Even today, however, desire to eliminate dependence on oil is making these types of products more and more economically sound. With the development of the carbon credit market, whereby environmentally friendly means of generating energy also generate credits with a monetary market value which can be sold to less environmentally friendly enterprises, advances from oil to biofuels may also be profitable.
While these fuels are already making a relatively significant change in the way that the human population thinks about motor fuel, both fuels have one significant shortfall. While the underlying source of the fuels can be grown in a regular cycle, both fuels are currently based on relatively complex plant forms (such as rapeseed, corn, and soybeans). While these crops are grown in huge numbers by agriculture around the world and are well understood, the plants still take a significant amount of time to grow which necessarily limits crop size. Further, the processes to turn these devices into fuel often only utilize the seed kernel or other product of the plant and are unable to utilize all the plant structure in fuel production. While the discarded components may be useful elsewhere, demand for fuel can lead to an excess of plant products not useful in its production.
While oils and alcohols to be used can be derived from virtually any type of plant, the current use of more complex life forms creates unnecessary waste and problems from fertilizer runoff and complicated markets. In particular, most foodstuffs, animal feeds, and raw materials formed by plants and used by humans are from relatively complex organisms. While much of the plant waste is used as animal feed or bedding, or may be left on the field as a form of fertilizer, this means that humans get very little value from a plant compared to the actual biomass of the plant produced.
This shortfall results in two significant concerns in the use of these materials as motors fuels. In the first instance, the supply of raw materials is cyclical over a relatively long period. Often only one or two harvests of the raw material can be made every year. This results in the need to plan ahead for demand needs. Further, because the plant growing cycle is necessarily dependent on the weather and various other related factors outside of the growers' control, the cyclical pattern is also somewhat unpredictable. In this way the cost of the fuels can become unexpected and can experience fluctuations which are undesirable to the eventual consumer.
Because of these types of problems, it is expected that, in the future, photosynthetic microorganisms such as algae, Cyanobacteria, plankton, and similar lifeforms will play a larger role than higher plants in photosynthetic carbon dioxide fixation because they have higher photosynthetic rates per unit biomass and, if optimized, can be cultivated in a compact space.
The potential of algae, Cyanobacteria, and other similar microorganisms as a food staple in the human diet has been investigated over many years in several countries. In the US and Japan, algal biomass including Chlorella and Spirulina is produced commercially, primarily as health food and is available for human consumption through a relatively large number of outlets. Algae are also used in lagoons on farms to process livestock waste and thereby lower amounts of pollutants, including phosphorus and nitrogen, in ground-water.
Further, algae and other microorganisms can be used as a raw material for the production of oil or alcohol to be used as a motor fuel. The high lipid content of many microalgae produces high natural omega-3 content which can be useful for human consumption or in the production of nutritional supplements as well as making it particularly valuable as a source of oil for motor fuel. It is also believed that algae can produce up to 60 percent of their weight in useful fuel molecules called triacylglycerols. It should be recognized that algae and other microorganisms can be used for a number of purposes and the system and methods discussed herein can be used for the production of these materials for any purpose.
Production of algae under current standards, however, would be expected to be unable to meet demand if algae products were used for motor fuel or otherwise became widespread. In particular, traditionally algae and Cyanobacteria have been grown only in laboratory photobioreactors which are not viable for commercial production, and in outdoor raceways, in open lakes, and in oceans. While these later methods are effective at producing algae for commercial use, these types of systems require vast amounts of space compared to the amount of algae they produce and are relatively difficult to harvest and keep clear of contamination. Further, just like other crops, photosynthetic microorganisms produced in outdoor raceways are at the mercy of the weather and contamination.
Hydroponics is the art of growing plants without soil and has been practiced for many years. Hydroponic systems for growing flowers, fruit, and vegetables in a controlled environment and without use of soil has been practiced in over 10 known applications over the last 40 years. Generally, controlled hydroponic systems for the production of complex plants such as commercial flowers or vegetables comprise a controlled environmental enclosure in which plants are germinated and grown on trays. The enclosure is usually a conventional greenhouse. A structure is formed with a steel skeleton, the skeleton then being covered with panes of transparent glass or plastic to allow sunshine onto the plants to allow photosynthesis. Most of these applications also include some type of air conditioning (whether heating or cooling) and distribution system, a water supply and irrigation system, and may also include artificial light sources to enhance light available to the plants.
These types of traditional photobioreactors are simply not commercially viable for mass production of algae, Cyanobacteria, and other microorganisms. They are not cost effective in producing large quantities of high quality. Because the structures are simply too expensive to construct at sufficient size, and as opposed to more valuable crops such as vegetables and flowers, algae simply does not have a sufficiently high margin to justify such production.
Because no efficient large-scale photobioreactors had yet been available, open cultivation ponds and clear tubes and tank systems have been used for almost all commercial algae production (generally for use as food additives). However, it is difficult to obtain high productivity in open ponds because the temperature and light intensity vary throughout the day and year and tube and tank systems are costly to construct and maintain. In addition, open ponds require a large surface area, and problems with contamination arise.
It is therefore desirable for a large-scale photobioreaction to be economically feasible for the purposes of mass-producing algae, Cyanobacteria, and other microorganisms from which biofuel may be derived.